Chip Roy writes for the Federalist about powerful forces working together to hurt American health care.
In the past year, health insurance premiums have skyrocketed more than 24 percent — the highest recorded one-year increase.America’s health care industry has a big problem on the horizon — namely that Americans do not trust “Big Health Care” with their personal health decisions. One silver lining to the Covid pandemic is that it lifted the veil of the public health bureaucracy, behind which lies a bloated, unaccountable, and opulent industry comprised of public health “experts,” Big Pharma, insurance companies, and large hospital corporations. But this problem presents us with a world of opportunity through its very simple solution: health care freedom.
Let’s start with how we got into this mess. Our health care system has evolved into an insurance-run, government-dictated bureaucratic racket that creates problems funded by the government and paid for with your tax dollars.
Historically, the American medical industry — built on cornerstones of a strong personal relationship between doctor and patient, the incentive of free enterprise, and freedom of choice — has propelled world-changing innovations and provided the best medical care on Earth. Yet today, this system prevents Americans from accessing the very medical miracles it offers by jacking up prices for care that “insurance” plans won’t cover.
It’s not because the Big Health Care corporatists just woke up one morning and decided to put health care out of reach. It’s because years of government regulation and the concentration of power into the hands of large corporations have marginalized doctors and patients. Setting aside the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, at least 10 major federal health care bills were signed into law between 1982 and 2010. These “reforms” imposed massive regulations on our health care system, creating an alphabet soup of government constraints — from UMRA to HIPAA, from EMTALA to COBRA — that have been squeezing out innovation and competition for years.